(Spoilers ahead, proceed at your own risk.) 

I finished watching breaking bad recently and i feel like writing about it somehow. Considering the type of show it is, pretty violent, dark and gritty, I didn’t expect it to affect me so much but there we are. 

Breaking bad is the story of a man, Walter White, that receives a terminal lung cancer diagnosis and in order to make sure that his family will be taken care of after he’s gone, he’s setting out to become a meth cook and make as much money he can as fast as possible. The point being that he doesn’t have much time to live anyway so he needs to make that money fast. 737,000 American dollars to be precise. Money to cover college fees for his son and unborn daughter, everyday life, his wife expenses since she won’t be able to work full time while having a newborn to look after, mortgage payments etc. 

He meets a former student of his, Jesse, under some weird and unforeseen circumstances and together create a meth lab and they cook and sell meth. 

Walter is presented as this mellow, law abiding and responsible fellow. A high school chemistry teacher, an almost sweet middle aged man that everyone around him seems to like, yet it’s somewhat clear that no one treats him as an equal. 

It’s not so much the things that are said or the things that happen throughout this story that made me feel the way I feel. I don’t even know how I feel to be honest. I believe it’s more  the things that actually were never said and yet they were right there the whole time that stayed with me. 

Walter literally unravels in the story and shows everyone the face they don’t dare to believe exists when looking at him. He portrayed the actual representation of the saying “if you don’t respect me, you’ll be afraid of me” and I can’t explain how witnessing this transformation, or unraveling if you will, was terrifying and liberating at the same time. 

This is a man that started off as caring about his family and doing everything in his power to protect and provide for them and slowly but surely he turns into a megalomaniac, a killer, a masterful manipulator that will stop at nothing to get what he wants, to get what he deserves, to claim what’s his. 

Everyone in my opinion is unraveling in this series. From his wife that starts off by being suspicious of his change in attitude yet still loving him and ends up being terrified of him, to his son that violently cuts him off at the end, even though he was on his side through and through up until he found out the truth about him. His brother in law that used to see him a low key family man that leads the most uninteresting life and then the same man wanted to kill him with his bare hands so that he can make sure no one will ever get hurt by his actions.

It is a fucking rollercoaster is an understatement. 

I’m not sure where to begin when it comes to Jesse. Jesse is already in a bad place when he meets Walter. He’s using meth and any drug he can get his hands on except heroine, up until he met Jane.

He’s young and reckless, irresponsible as anyone in their early 20’s, broke, unwanted and abandoned by his family. His drug use has created way too many problems for the family and mainly himself and so he got kicked out of the family home. 

Jesse in my eyes is almost childlike. He’s not naive, if anything he’s rather streetwise and can discern people’s character and motives pretty quickly and accurately. Yet he does have a blind spot for Walter and it’s easy to see how he wants to believe that Walter is not a monster and Walter keeps disappointing him again and again and again. 

The amount of devastation this guy experienced and the loss he had to deal with is astonishing and in every episode I kept telling myself that he won’t make it and yet…he did. 

The tragedies that unfolded are so gut wrenching at times and so shattering, so sad and so inevitable, they cut so deep that they end up being almost comical, so life like. 

Cause life is nothing if not comical sometimes. 

PS : there a lot of layers to this story but it feels important to get this out now so I might return with more insights.